"languages, Latvian and Lithuanian; the Celtic languages, including Irish; and Greek are also Indo-European. Outside the Indo-European family, Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian are Uralic languages while Maltese is the only Afroasiatic language with official status in the EU. The Basque language, a language isolate whose roots are unknown, is an official language in some parts of northern Spain, but not an official language of the EU. Most official EU languages are written in the Latin script. The two exceptions are Greek, which is written in the Greek script, and Bulgarian, which is written in Cyrillic script. With the accession of"
"Languages of Estonia The official language of Estonia is Estonian, a Uralic language which is related to Finnish. It is unrelated to the bordering Russian and Latvian languages, both of which are Indo-European (more specifically East Slavic and Baltic, respectively). Standard Estonian is mainly based on the North Estonian language, while South Estonian comprises several dialects, specifically Võro, Mulgi and Tartu. Võro, being furthest away from Standard Estonian, is the only one to have been given an ISO 639-3 language code by SIL (""vro""). Võru is widely accepted to have a subdialect Setu, although some consider it a separate language."
"belonging to the same Finnic branch of the Uralic language family. Nevertheless, the two languages are not mutually intelligible, although educated native speakers can read the other language with a greater or lesser degree of understanding. Estonian and Finnish are only distantly related to the Hungarian language. Written with the Latin script, Estonian is the language of the Estonian people and the official language of the country. One-third of the standard vocabulary is derived from adding suffixes to root words. The oldest known examples of written Estonian originate in 13th century chronicles. During the Soviet era, the Russian language was"
"region and/or the bend of the middle Volga. The strong case for Proto-Uralic is supported by common vocabulary with regularities in sound correspondences, as well as by the fact that the Uralic languages have many similarities in structure and grammar. The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, United States classifies Finnish as a level III language (of 4 levels) in terms of learning difficulty for native English speakers. Finnish is spoken by about five million people, most of whom reside in Finland. There are also notable Finnish-speaking minorities in Sweden, Norway, Russia, Estonia, Brazil, Canada, and the United States. The"
"Finnic languages The Finnic languages (Fennic), or Baltic Finnic languages (Balto-Finnic, Balto-Fennic), are a branch of the Uralic language family spoken around the Baltic Sea by Finnic peoples, mainly in Finland and Estonia, by about 7 million people. Traditionally, eight Finnic languages have been recognized. The major modern representatives of the family are Finnish and Estonian, the official languages of their respective nation states. The other Finnic languages in the Baltic Sea region are Ingrian and Votic, spoken in Ingria by the Gulf of Finland; and Livonian, once spoken around the Gulf of Riga. Spoken farther northeast are Karelian, Ludic"
"Baltic to the Ural Mountains as well as the Carpathian Basin. The majority of the Steppe Magyars likely belonged to this haplogroup, carrying the Ugric Hungarian language. Finno-Ugric peoples The Finno-Ugric peoples are any of several peoples of North-West Eurasia who speak languages of the Finno-Ugric group of the Uralic language family, such as the Khanty, Mansi, Hungarians, Maris, Mordvins, Sámi, Estonians, Karelians, Finns, Udmurts, and Komis. The four most numerous Finno-Ugric peoples are the Hungarians (13–14 million), Finns (6–7 million), Estonians (1.1 million) and Mordvins (744,000). The first three of these have their own independent states – Hungary, Finland,"
"North Germanic languages are spoken in Scandinavian countries and include Danish (Denmark), Norwegian (Norway), Swedish (Sweden and parts of Finland), or Elfdalian (in a small part of central Sweden), Faroese (Faroe Islands), and Icelandic (Iceland). English has a long history of contact with Scandinavian languages, given the immigration of Scandinavians early in the history of Britain, and has similar structure with Scandinavian languages. Uralic is native to northern Eurasia. Finno-Ugric groups the Uralic languages other than Samoyedic. Finnic languages include Finnish and Estonian. The Sami languages are closely related to Finnic. The Ugric languages are represented in Europe with the"
"depending on the language, Indo-Iranian, Turkic, Baltic, Germanic, and Slavic languages. Finnic languages, including Finnish, have borrowed in particular from Baltic and Germanic languages, and to a lesser extent from Slavic and Indo-Iranian languages. Furthermore, a certain group of very basic and neutral words exists in Finnish and other Finnic languages that are absent from other Uralic languages, but without a recognizable etymology from any known language. These words are usually regarded as the last remnant of the Paleo-European language spoken in Fennoscandia before the arrival of the proto-Finnic language. Words included in this group are e.g. ""jänis"" (hare), ""musta"""
"consider, for example, the cŭ/cū minimal pair in the dialect spoken near Palmi (Calabria, Italy): Almost all Uralic languages, such as Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian have a distinctive moraic chroneme as a phoneme (also arguably called archiphoneme or epenthetic vowel/consonant). The etymology of the vocalic chroneme has been traced to a voiced velar fricative in the hypothetical Proto-Uralic language, such that becomes . For example, ""taka-"" ""back-"", ""takka"" ""fireplace"" and ""taakka"" ""burden"" are unrelated words. It is also grammatically important; the third person marker is a chroneme (""menee"" ""s/he goes""), and often in the spoken Finnish of the Helsinki area"
"Uralic peoples The Uralic peoples or Uralic speaking peoples are the peoples speaking Uralic languages, divided into two large groups: Finno-Ugric peoples and Samoyedic peoples. The Samoyeds consists of Northern Samoyed: Nenets, Enets and Nganasan, and Southern Samoyed: Selkup and now extinct Sayan Samoyed. The Finno-Ugric group contains two branches: Ugric including Ob-Ugric peoples i.e. the Mansi and Khanty and the Hungarians. The Finnic group has four sub-divisions: The Sami, The Baltic Finns: Finns proper, Karelians, Ingrians, Vepsians, Votians, Estonians and Livonians, and the Volga Finns: the Mordvins subdivided into Moksha and Erza and the Mari, and the Permians. According"
"the Uralic language family, unrelated to any neighboring language and distantly related to Finnish and Estonian. It is the largest of the Uralic languages in terms of the number of speakers and the only one spoken in Central Europe. There are sizable populations of Hungarian speakers in Romania, the Czech and Slovak Republics, the former Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Israel, and the U.S. Smaller groups of Hungarian speakers live in Canada, Slovenia, and Austria, but also in Australia, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela and Chile. Standard Hungarian is based on the variety spoken in the capital of Budapest, although use of the standard"
"but prior to the development of their most distinctive features. Finno-Samic languages The Finno-Samic languages (also ""Finno-Saamic, Finno-Lappic, Saamic–Fennic"") are a hypothetical subgroup of the Uralic family, and are made up of 22 languages classified into either the Sami languages, which are spoken by the Sami people who inhabit the Sápmi region of northern Fennoscandia, or Finnic languages, which include the major languages Finnish and Estonian. The grouping is not universally recognized as valid. The Mordvinic languages appear to also align closely with both Finnic and Samic. Some innovations in the consonant system are shared by Finnic and Mordvinic specifically,"
"Finno-Samic languages The Finno-Samic languages (also ""Finno-Saamic, Finno-Lappic, Saamic–Fennic"") are a hypothetical subgroup of the Uralic family, and are made up of 22 languages classified into either the Sami languages, which are spoken by the Sami people who inhabit the Sápmi region of northern Fennoscandia, or Finnic languages, which include the major languages Finnish and Estonian. The grouping is not universally recognized as valid. The Mordvinic languages appear to also align closely with both Finnic and Samic. Some innovations in the consonant system are shared by Finnic and Mordvinic specifically, while a number of innovations in the vowel system are"
"languages are a subgroup of the larger Uralic family of languages, which also includes Hungarian. These languages are markedly different from most other languages spoken in Europe, which belong to the Indo-European family of languages. Native Finns can also be divided according to dialect into subgroups sometimes called ""heimo"" (lit. ""tribe""), although such divisions have become less important due to internal migration. Today, there are approximately 6–7 million ethnic Finns and their descendants worldwide, with majority of them living in their native Finland and the surrounding countries, namely Sweden, Russia and Norway. Overseas Finnish diaspora has long been established in"
"Finns. On the basis of comparative linguistics, it has been suggested that the separation of the Finnic and the Sami languages took place during the 2nd millennium BC, and that the Proto-Uralic roots of the entire language group date from about the 6th to the 8th millennium BC. When the Uralic languages were first spoken in the area of contemporary Finland is debated. It is thought that Proto-Finnic (the proto-language of the Finnic languages) was not spoken in modern Finland, because the maximum divergence of the daughter languages occurs in modern-day Estonia. Therefore, Finnish was already a separate language when"
"would (in the largest scope ever proposed) include the Uralic and Turkic languages as well as Mongolian, Korean, Tamil and Japanese. However, contemporary linguistics views this proposal as controversial. On the other hand, it is also the case that some languages that have developed from agglutinative proto-languages have lost this feature. For example, contemporary Estonian, which is so closely related to Finnish that the two languages are mutually intelligible, has shifted towards the fusional type. (It has also lost other features typical of the Uralic families, such as vowel harmony.) Examples of agglutinative languages include the Uralic languages, such as"
"(U 582), and the other is in Gotland, a Swedish island in the Baltic Sea, with the inscription ""finlandi"" (G 319 M) dating from the 11th century. With regard to the ancestry of the Finnish people, the modern view emphasizes the overall continuity in Finland's archeological finds and (earlier more obvious) linguistic surroundings. Archeological data suggest the spreading of at least cultural influences from many sources ranging from the south-east to the south-west following gradual developments rather than clear-cut migrations. Just as uncertain are the possible mediators and the timelines for the development of the Uralic majority language of the"
"the right), there were about 1,000 adherents of the Taara faith or Maausk in Estonia (see Maavalla Koda). The Jewish community has an estimated population of about 1,900 (see History of the Jews in Estonia). Around 68,000 people consider themselves atheists. The official language, Estonian, belongs to the Finnic branch of the Uralic languages. Estonian is closely related to Finnish, spoken in Finland, across the other side of the Gulf of Finland, and is one of the few languages of Europe that is not of an Indo-European origin. Despite some overlaps in the vocabulary due to borrowings, in terms of"
"analytic structure, such as Modern English, Danish and Afrikaans, or agglutinative, such as Persian and Armenian. Other descendants are fusional, including Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, Lithuanian, Latvian, Slavic languages, as well as Latin and the Romance languages and certain Germanic languages. Some languages shift over time from agglutinative to fusional. For example, while most Uralic languages are predominantly agglutinative, Estonian is markedly evolving in the direction of a fusional language. On the other hand, Finnish, its close relative, exhibits fewer fusional traits, thereby keeping closer to the mainstream Uralic type. One feature of many fusional languages is their systems of declensions."
"considered dialects of Finnish and are mutually intelligible with it. The smaller languages are endangered. The last native speaker of Livonian died in 2013, and only about a dozen native speakers of Votic remain. Regardless, even for these languages, the shaping of a standard language and education in it continues. The geographic centre of the maximum divergence between the languages is located south of the Gulf of Finland. The Finnic languages are located at the western end of the Uralic language family. A close affinity to their northern neighbors, the Sami languages, has long been assumed, though many of the"
"part of Uralic. Meanwhile, in the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland, a chair for Finnish language and linguistics at the University of Helsinki was created in 1850, first held by Castrén. In 1883, the Finno-Ugrian Society was founded in Helsinki on the proposal of Otto Donner, which would lead to Helsinki overtaking St. Petersburg as the chief northern center of research of the Uralic languages. During the late 19th and early 20th century (until the separation of Finland from Russia following the Russian revolution), a large number of stipendiates were sent by the Society to survey the still less known"
"Hungarian language Hungarian () is a Finno-Ugric language spoken in Hungary and several neighbouring countries. It is the official language of Hungary and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. Outside Hungary it is also spoken by communities of Hungarians in the countries that today make up Slovakia, western Ukraine (Subcarpathia), central and western Romania (Transylvania), northern Serbia (Vojvodina), northern Croatia, and northern Slovenia (Mur region). It is also spoken by Hungarian diaspora communities worldwide, especially in North America (particularly the United States and Canada) and in Israel. Like Finnish and Estonian, Hungarian belongs to the Uralic"
"(Icelandic and Faroese) and a continental group (Danish, Norwegian and Swedish). The division between Insular Nordic (""önordiska""/""ønordisk""/""øynordisk"") and Continental Scandinavian (""Skandinavisk"") is based on mutual intelligibility between the two groups and developed due to different influences, particularly the political union of Denmark and Norway (1536–1814) which led to significant Danish influence on central and eastern Norwegian dialects (Bokmål or Dano-Norwegian). The North Germanic languages are national languages in Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, whereas the non-Germanic Finnish is spoken by the majority in Finland. In inter-Nordic contexts, texts are today often presented in three versions: Finnish, Icelandic, and one of"
"of the Uralic languages. As originally formulated by Castrén, Altaic included not only Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus (=Tungusic), but also Finno-Ugric and Samoyed. The original Altaic family came to be known as the Ural–Altaic. In the ""Ural–Altaic"" nomenclature, Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic are ""Uralic"", whereas Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic are ""Altaic"", as are Korean and Japanese if they are included at all. For much of the 19th and the early 20th centuries, the theory of a common Ural–Altaic family was widespread, based on such shared features as vowel harmony and agglutination. However, while the Ural–Altaic hypothesis can still be found in"
"Finns such as the Mari, rather than to Baltic Finns. The results suggest that the territories of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have been settled by Finno-Ugric-speaking tribes since the early Mesolithic period. On the other hand, some linguists do not consider it likely that a Baltic-Finnic language form could have existed at such an early date. According to these views, the Finno-Ugric languages appeared in Finland and Baltic only during the Early Bronze Age (ca. 1,800 BC), if not later. The Finnic peoples share a common cultural heritage: the art of ancient ""rune"" (poem) singing in the Kalevala meter, estimated"
"Finno-Ugric peoples The Finno-Ugric peoples are any of several peoples of North-West Eurasia who speak languages of the Finno-Ugric group of the Uralic language family, such as the Khanty, Mansi, Hungarians, Maris, Mordvins, Sámi, Estonians, Karelians, Finns, Udmurts, and Komis. The four most numerous Finno-Ugric peoples are the Hungarians (13–14 million), Finns (6–7 million), Estonians (1.1 million) and Mordvins (744,000). The first three of these have their own independent states – Hungary, Finland, and Estonia. The traditional area of the indigenous Sami people is in Northern Fenno-Scandinavia and the Kola Peninsula in Northwest Russia and is known as Sápmi. Some"
"Eurasian steppe according to archaeological references he cites. Though Estonia is included among the Baltic states due to its location, Estonian is a Uralic language and is not related to the Baltic languages, which are Indo-European. The Baltic languages are of particular interest to linguists because they retain many archaic features, which are believed to have been present in the early stages of the Proto-Indo-European language. However, linguists have had a hard time establishing the precise relationship of the Baltic languages to other languages in the Indo-European family. Several of the extinct Baltic languages have a limited or nonexistent written"
"for the whole family). Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic are listed in ISO 639-5 as primary branches of Uralic. Nodes of the traditional family tree recognized in some overview sources: Little explicit evidence has however been presented in favour of Donner's model since his original proposal, and numerous alternate schemes have been proposed. Especially in Finland, there has been a growing tendency to reject the Finno-Ugric intermediate protolanguage. A recent competing proposal instead unites Ugric and Samoyedic in an ""East Uralic"" group for which shared innovations can be noted. The Finno-Permic grouping still holds some support, though the arrangement of its subgroups"
"Uralic mythologies Uralic mythologies is an umbrella term for the mythologies and indigenous religions of the Finnic, Ugric, and Samoyedic peoples, who speak related Uralic languages. The mythologies retain traces of archaic Uralic religious systems merged with foreign influences, both ancient and modern, and are similar to the beliefs of neighboring non-Uralic peoples of north-central Eurasia. The Finnic, Ugric, and Samoyedic people are “from Norway to the region of the Ob River in Siberia and southward into the Carpathian Basin in central Europe and Ukraine."" The “Uralic family of languages” are those spoken by the Finno-Ugric and Samoyed people. A"
"spread over most of southern Finland at the end of the Iron and early Medieval Age. There is no commonly accepted evidence of early state formations in Finland, and the presumably Iron Age origins of urbanization are contested. The question of the timelines for the evolution and the spreading of the current Finnish languages is controversial, and new theories challenging older ones have been introduced continuously. It is widely believed that Finno-Ugric (or Uralic) languages were first spoken in Finland and the adjacent areas during the Comb Ceramic period, around 4000 BC at the latest. During the 2nd millennium BC"
"is a mandatory subject in Finnish schools, since Finland by law is a bilingual country. Danish is mandatory in Faroese and Greenlandic schools, as these insular states are a part of the Danish Realm (""Rigsfællesskabet""). Iceland also teaches Danish, since Iceland too was a part of the Danish Realm until 1918. Beside these and the insular Scandinavian languages Faroese and Icelandic, which are also North Germanic languages, there are the Finnic and Sami branches of the Uralic languages, spoken in Finland and in northern Norway, Sweden and Finland, respectively; and Greenlandic, an Eskimo–Aleut language, spoken in Greenland. All the Nordic"
"Proto-Finnic language Proto-Finnic or Proto-Baltic-Finnic is the common ancestor of the Finnic languages, which include the national languages Finnish and Estonian. Proto-Finnic is not attested in any texts, but has been reconstructed by linguists. Proto-Finnic is itself descended ultimately from Proto-Uralic. Three stages of Proto-Finnic are distinguished in literature. The sounds of Proto-Finnic can be reconstructed through the comparative method. Reconstructed Proto-Finnic is traditionally transcribed using the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet. The following UPA and related conventions are adopted in this article for transcribing Proto-Finnic forms: The Proto-Finnic consonant inventory had relatively few phonemic fricatives, much like that of the modern"
"unity of the Soviet people."" East Slavic languages (Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian) dominated in the European part of the Soviet Union, the Baltic languages Lithuanian and Latvian, and the Finnic language Estonian were used next to Russian in the Baltic region, while the Moldovan (the only Romance language in the union) was used in the southeast region. In the Caucasus alongside Russian there were Armenian, Azeri and Georgian. In the Russian far north, there were several minority groups who spoke different Uralic languages; most of the languages in Central Asia were Turkic with the exception of Tajik, which is an"